A helpful middleground is to allow us to comment on these threads.
Some of these companies are undesirable for various reasons and for the community to be precluded from discussing their experiences, but only when its a YC company, is disingenuous, and renders the parent comment questionable. We talk about all manner of companies here. Why is a YC company immune from discourse?
HN is for thoughtful conversation about topics of intellectual curiosity, and job ads are intrinsically uninteresting. Threads on uninteresting, predictable topics tend to be tedious and nasty (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). It's easy to predict what threads on job ads would look like: a generic boo-or-yay referendum on each company, repeated each time. But the highest-motivated commenters would be ones with pre-existing grievances, so it wouldn't even be boo-or-yay. It would mostly just be boo. That would make HN worse, not better.
Uninteresting posts like job ads arguably shouldn't be on HN in the first place, but they're there for an out-of-band reason, which is that it's proper for HN to give something back to YC in exchange for funding it. Since that's their only reason for existing, it doesn't make sense to turn them into regular threads.
The opposite is true of Launch HNs, incidentally, which is one of the other concessions HN gives to YC. In those cases, there is something new and interesting to discuss—the launch of a startup—and since each company only gets one such thread, repeats aren't an issue. It's in HN's interest to have open comment threads on those submissions, so we do: https://news.ycombinator.com/launches.
> But since the only commenters motivated to participate in such discussions would be disgruntled ones with pre-existing grievances, it wouldn't even be boo-or-yay. It would just be boo.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I take issue with this statement though, because daily there are companies posted here that get a critical review, and inevitably a crowd amasses that comes in to provide counterpoints to the negative testimonials, the majority of the time a lot of good on topic and off topic conversations ensue. To me, that makes HN better.
I get that I'll catch heat for even suggesting this, but maybe consider a poll, some day if you have a change of heart. I think you might be surprised that the community would like to participate in those job threads the same way they do in "Whos Hiring?" for example, they're the same nature.
We don't allow testimonials and discussions and criticisms of companies in the ordinary non-YC job "Who's Hiring" thread either; once a month, Dan has to go patrol those threads looking for people trying to start off-topic discussions on people's job ads.
> daily there are companies posted here that get a critical review, and inevitably a crowd amasses that comes in to provide counterpoints to the negative testimonials, the majority of the time a lot of good on topic and off topic conversations ensue.
Aren't those companies already established? Isn't the topic usually about something related to a new product or scandal? Usually the topic circles around that. A new YC startup job ad likely won't have that.
With that said, any YC startups want to give it a shot? Allow comments and see if the questions helps with their recruitment? Might help craft a better ad.
> With that said, any YC startups want to give it a shot? Allow comments and see if the questions helps with their recruitment? Might help craft a better ad.
Wow that's a good idea, and compromise that I had not considered. Imagine if it were optional, that's a great solution to satisfy both sides and puts the startup in control of their own involvement.
> You can write stuff about these companies anywhere on HN
False, you cannot comment on a YC hiring post.
Either all posts are treated the same, or they're not. All we are discussing here is the ability to comment, I'm not saying I need a filter toggle, though I'd happily use one.
These are job ads, you can't go off on tangents in people's job ads on Who's Hiring threads either. All posts are not treated the same and this is one of the biggest not-same type of post on HN. Topicality is pretty important to HN threads. There's really no shortage of ways to be both on topic and say things about more or less any company, YC or not, on HN.
You reply doesn't really engage with my argument at all, you pick a single word and head right for bombast and innuendo. If that's the sort of thing you want to write on job ads, it's a solid point against the idea.
I'm honestly fine with them. These posts are the reason this site gets to exist without needing some other more nefarious monetisation. Ads can be a lot worse...
Can we get comments enabled on them? I'd be interested to see what other people have to say about the companies. I think it'd be an interesting compromise. They don't really bother me either way.
Comments are disabled because many startups are terrible employers and having those reviews right next to the ads would kill revenue for HN. Can't have the truth interfere with the business model.
It makes sense to me that most YC Big Wigs would be indifferent towards HN, but will quickly come down on it if their preferred companies are getting lambasted by comments on their own website.
I'm not the person you're looking for, but I don't think the reason is anything nefarious. It's just that the posts have a single point, which is to tell you the company is hiring. If you let people comment, it inevitable devolves into some nitpicking or criticism of the company (or more rarely some kind of shilling) which frustrates the purpose of the post.
If there is a news story, a "my experience at company X" blogpost, any kind of relevant point to be made about that company, someone could submit that as a story.
Letting people comment on job ads would just turn them into lightning rods for whatever bad things people want to say, and then what would be the point?
I'm sure I have seen a moderator reply in one of the who is hiring threads saying something similar that allowing comments just attracts criticism and derails the threads
> Letting people comment on job ads would just turn them into lightning rods for whatever bad things people want to say, and then what would be the point
Hearing whatever bad (or possibly good) things people have to say about company X is exactly what I would want and would greatly increase the value, of those posts as well as my likelihood of clicking on them.
That's not a great idea, some of the folks here with the most karma are just familiar names who talk the most like myself, they don't always have great opinions.
I agree, I'm probably in the same boat with 5000+ karma but for the most part worthless comments and oftentimes getting yelled at by dang, but some filtering would be better than none at all. My guess is that companies don't want people to comment on their posts because of fear of the conversation turning extremely negative, since probably most people to comment would be people who have a bone to pick for some reason. I notice that reddit also doesn't allow commenting on their ads, even though the ads present themselves for the most part as just another post(just like hn)
For all the people asking HN to just allow comments on their job ads, why not just fork the linked repo and add a side-channel to the job ad posts for discussion?
Look, you can make and use whatever extension you like. But, posting something like this here, is a lack of respect for this website and its community. Because the visibility that these posts get are the least we can offer to this forum for what it gives us. And you can simply hide them.
I'm not sure how meaningful it is to ask an author who proclaims to not use HN to comport their attitude or behavior to your understanding of respecting HN. But I see this as well within the bounds of HN community spirit — IMO the heart of hacking was originally more about defying authority or boundaries than entrepreneurial or industry interest.
But I certainly have personal hangups about silly things that bother me to the point of distraction, even in small quantities. For example if an article has an animated gif in it, I literally can't read it once I've seen it. So I can understand why some people might get put off by something seemingly minor. And making a blocker is a good solution, even if very niche.
HN exists as basically a job board with submissions in between to being people in. But considering how non invasive these ads are I really don't see the issue. I get it, services have to be paid for somehow and I'd rather see some text ads then have my information sold
